Series

Connect With Us

On Media

The New Yorker's 'Obama Memos'

By Dylan Byers

01/24/12 07:36 AM EST

Jennifer Epstein and I report on "The Obama Memos," the primary source process bomb published in this week's issue of The New Yorker:

The White House likes to describe them as “process” stories and is famously uncooperative with reporters trying to do them, so the tantalizing glimpse into President Barack Obama’s decision-making that appears in The New Yorker this week — based on hundreds of pages of internal White House documents — is something of a milestone.

The story, “The Obama Memos,” by staff writer Ryan Lizza, includes “probably the most process we’ve seen in White House reporting” on the Obama administration, said Jared Bernstein, former chief economist and economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden in an interview with POLITICO.

But that isn’t a bad thing, Bernstein said. “How presidents make decisions and how they change over time is of great interest to people.”

The article is notable not so much because it includes startling revelations — it doesn’t, really — but because it literally documents the conventional wisdom on Obama’s first three years in office, which is that the idealistic campaign promise of a post-partisan presidency has been thwarted.

“My contention, not to be too cynical, is that it really was impossible to change Washington and that Obama should have always known that,” Lizza told POLITICO. “Given the polarization story, there was never a real chance for him to have a post-partisan presidency.”

Past attempts to document Obama’s transition from idealism to realism — such as Ron Suskind’s 2011 “Confidence Men” or Jodi Kantor’s “The Obamas” — were primarily culled from the reminiscences of administration sources.

The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward — famous for the documents he always obtains from cooperative sources — collected some for “Obama’s Wars,” a 2010 book about Iraq and Afghanistan, but Lizza’s piece is the first to examine Obama’s economic decision-making process with official documents that include the president’s own handwritten notes.

“I spoke with dozens of White House officials over the last few years, and what I learned is people don’t have very reliable memories,” Lizza said. “They contradict themselves. You look at the paper trail, and you realize what they told you isn’t true. So I decided to rely almost exclusively on primary source material."